Symposium: Educating the Irish Genius. Kilkenny, 25th – 27th July

This “International Symposium and Cultural Weekend bills itself as “an accessible, world-class enquiry into the shaping of the Irish mind during the Enlightenment, also known as the long Eighteenth Century.”

Our international symposium explores the proposition that we can, and we should, identify a discrete Irish Enlightenment, just as we do a distinctive Scottish Enlightenment. The greater Enlightenment emphasized experimentation in pursuit of evidence-based knowledge—what, broadly, we call the scientific method. In many ways, Ireland from the Tudors to well beyond Oliver Cromwell constituted a large, complex, and often messy social experiment, with new ideas about settlement, new methods of agriculture, and more being tried out.

The Symposium is held at the Newpark Hotel Kilkenny and hosted by Kilkenny College, “one of Ireland’s oldest, most respected schools and the alma mater of Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, and other great philosophes”.